Where Should I Ski

As it may or may not be clear, I love snow and I love to ski. There are numerous websites and mobile apps out there that will tell you how much new snow a resort has received, but not many that will forecast out and come up with a simple 1-5 rating of how good the snow will be or sort and display by distance to the user. Enter whereshouldiski.com, a new website that I built and am piloting this 2012-2013 ski season that helps skiers decide where to go ski to maximize their enjoyment.

Technology-wise, I am using Python to query the weather sources and generate recommendations stored in a CouchDB database with ElasticSearch on top driving the search.

Scott's Cycle and Sports

My local bike shop (or LBS) has been around since 1993, but never had the time to create a well-designed, powerful looking website. They were currently running a Wordpress site with a pretty vanilla template. After a few bike rides with the local shop manager Brian, I told him that I am also a freelance web designer and could help him with his site. After a few discussions about priorities and messaging, I found a nice parallax Wordpress template, put some creative thought around the images, typeface, and color palette, and mocked up a sample on an Amazon EC2 instance. Brian loved it, and in less than three weeks of initial discussions, he found himself owning a modern looking, responsive website with his same Wordpress administration he was familiar with.

UPDATE: Scotts has since purchased a software platform that includes inventory management and a web hosting solution. Their site no longer looks like what I designed for them.

Tri Cities Dog Park Society

The local dog park society, which helps to manage and maintain the local dog park, was in need of a website facelift. The new site is built on Joomla and features responsive web design for compatibility with Mobile and Tablet devices. An integrated calendar feature lets the leadership board enter events and keep members up-to-date with the latest happenings.

Sammy Cam

This is the reason why the site was originally created. Here were the basic requirements:

Have a live look-in on the dog in the apartment

Multiple cameras, since the apartment is a loft

Store an archive

View from any device (IE iPhone)

One thought was just setting up a Skype or Justin.tv account, but Skype doesn't store the history. With Justin.tv I had troubles with the iPhone app and the extra laptop I have is a bit old and doesn't run Flash very well.